I'm so disappointed by this book because there's a fascinating story inside - one about how Charles Lamb and his associates owned and personalised their books, and how this enhanced their value to various transatlantic book collectors and sellers. This is supposedly a popular book, not an academic one, but Gigante seems so in thrall to her primary sources that she runs from quotation to quotation without ever telling a coherent story. I also wonder if she is actually not a book historian but a literary one, hence constantly quoting from texts rather than writing about the volumes they appeared in. I kept waiting for the book to start and eventually had to acknowledge this scattergun mess was the whole book. I'm the perfect audience for a version of this book, just not this one.